Brother Nathan chuckled. “For how long?” he asked; and then introduced her to the three workers, who greeted her calmly and went on sorting their herbs. The loft was dark and cool; the window-frames, in which there were no sashes, opened wide on the still August fields and woods; the occasional brief words of the sorting-women seemed to drop into a pool of fragrant silence. The two visitors followed Brother Nathan down the room between piles of sorted herbs, and out into the sunshine again. Athalia drew a breath of ecstasy.
“It’s all so beautifully tranquil!” she whispered, looking about her with blue, excited eyes.
“Tay and tranquillity!” Lewis said, with an amused laugh.
But as they went along the grassy street this sense of tranquillity closed about them like a palpable peace. Now and then they stopped and spoke to some one—always an elderly person; and in each old face the experiences that life writes in unerasable lines about eyes and lips were hidden by a veil of calmness that was curiously unhuman.
“It isn’t canny, exactly,” Lewis told his wife, in a low voice. But she did not seem to hear him. She asked many questions of Eldress Hannah, who had taken them in charge, and once or twice she burst into impetuous appreciation of the idea of brotherhood, and even of certain theological principles—which last diverted her husband very much. Eldress Hannah showed them the dairy, and the work-room, and all there was to see, with a patient hospitality that kept them at an infinite distance. She answered Lewis’s questions about the community with a sad directness.
“Yee; there are not many of us now. The world’s people say we’re dying out. But the Lord will preserve the remnant to redeem the world, young man. Yee; when they come in from the world they cast their possessions into the whole; we own nothing, for ourselves. Nay; we don’t have many come. Brother William was the last. Why did he come?” She looked coldly at Athalia, who had asked the question. “Because he saw the way to peace. He’d had strife enough in the world. Yee,” she admitted, briefly, “some fall from grace, and leave us. The last was Lydia. She was one of our children, and I thought she was of the chosen. But she was only thirty when she fell away, and you can’t expect wisdom at that age. That was nearly twenty years ago. When she has tasted the dregs of the world she will come back to us—if she lives,” Eldress Hannah ended.
Athalia listened breathlessly, her rapt, unhumorous eyes fixed on Eldress Hannah’s still face. Now and then she asked a question, and once cried out that, after all, why wasn’t it the way to live? Peace and self-sacrifice and love! “Oh,” she said, turning to her husband, “can’t you feel the attraction of it? I should think even you could feel it!”
“I think I feel it—after a fashion,” he said, mildly; “I think I have always felt the attraction of community life.”
Afterward, when they had left all this somnolent peace and begun the long walk back to the station, he explained what he meant: “I couldn’t say so before the Eldress, but of course there are times when anybody can feel the charm of getting rid of personal responsibility—and that is what community life really means. It’s the relief of being a little cog in a big machine; in fact, the very attraction of it is a sort of temptation, to my way of looking at it. But it—well, it made me sleepy,” he confessed.
For once his wife had no reply. She was very quiet on that return journey in the cars, and in the days that followed she kept referring to their visit with a persistence that surprised her husband. She thought the net caps were beautiful; she thought the exquisite cleanness of everything was like a perfume—“the perfume of a wild rose!” she said, ecstatically. She thought the having everything in common was the way to live. “And just think how peaceful it is!”